Sigh. Yet again, I was lured in by an exciting trailer to see an entirely awful movie. I have got to stop watching trailers. At the very least, I have got to stop believing them.
Three Musketeers is a terrible movie. There are many, many things wrong with it. The script, for starters, is a disaster. I’m sorry to say this because it’s hard to write good stuff, and it must be nearly impossible to write good stuff that will hold up through two hours of movie. I know I couldn’t do it. But here, someone paid for this script, edited it, proofed it, revised, and no doubt re-revised, and someone finally signed off on it and said, “Great!” when they should have said, “Start over.”
Brian said, “If you’re going to do period, do period,” which is so true, unless you’re Sophia Coppola and you are intentionally dragging one century into another. Here, it seemed as though they meant to be anchored in the seventeenth century, and yet one comments to another that his outfit is “retro.” Another mentions how “sexy” he is. One man, when replying in the affirmative, announces: “Yep.” Insurance policies are mentioned. In a weird moment, a traffic citation is issued. This is disconcerting, and I haven’t gotten to the airships yet.
The airships, designed by Da Vinci, with the plans hidden by Da Vinci in a booby-trapped tunnel created by Da Vinci that has pressure-release guns that work flawlessly two hundred years after being loaded, cocked, and hidden in the underground bunker. It’s not just the guns. Da Vinci, as we know, was ahead of his time, but the manuscripts he hid underground two hundred years before Milady walks to exactly where they are and pulls the exact paper out of the exact cubby hole while being chased by forty guards, have not yellowed, brittled, cracked, or disintegrated. They roll up nicely. The ink is not faded.
(One wonders how Signore Da Vinci would have enjoyed the way he’s been memorialized in film. In this one, he’s a long-dead zeppelin designer, while in Ever After, he’s a painter-cum-matchmaker. I can see him slapping his head and saying, “If only I could have lived when I could have won a Nobel Prize!”)
No prizes for peace here, as airships appear and re-appear. They fight one another a la Pirates, and this is bad, because it made me think how much better this movie would have been had Johnny Depp suddenly rushed in. I wondered about propulsion, and if hot air is the lifter-upper, where the galley-folk were to be constantly stoking gigantic fires. I wondered whether the hot air would have scalded the people who jump into the air to cut enormous slits down the sides of the air bladder and why those people don’t fall to the ground.
It wouldn’t have hurt them if they had. A lady falls thousands of feet from the airship to the ocean without mishap. Then again, this same lady is able to fling herself with incredible force, and I defy anyone to do anything close to what she does, which is this: Stand in front of a booby-trapped hall-way. It is sliced with many diagonals of what appear to be laser beams, but must be really sharp wire. Now, bend your knees and jump in such a way that you are hurled from one side of the hallway to the other while contorting yourself this way and that to avoid these wires. I think she’d watched Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
She steals the jewels, takes them to London, hides them in the basement of the Tower, betrays everyone, falls out of the blimpship and survives.
Then, in one of the most optimistic moments in the history of film, Buckingham, the Englishman she has betrayed, fishes her out of the drink and implies that there’s going to be another movie. I hate to inform him: there will not be a sequel.
One other thing really disturbed me. Let’s see if I can articulate it at all: Louis XIII of France is depicted as a fluffy-sweet, afraid-of-Richelieu (who wouldn’t be?), effeminate young man who is obsessed with fashion and interior design. His wife, Queen Ann, is not only the brains of the outfit, but is also able to go toe-to-toe with the Evil Cardinal. The picture we get is that the king is a weak-character who happens to be homosexually-oriented, married to a smart woman who is fiercely loyal to him and desires his approval and love. In an age of forced political matrimonial alliances, you’ve got to feel sorry for both of these people.
Then, about two seconds after meeting D’Artagnan, His Majesty confides that he doesn’t know how to “get the girl” to which D’Artagnan tells him to tell the girl she’s pretty. This is a light bulb to His Majesty, who promptly does just that. Love is suddenly in the air.
This offended me, to wit: a young man is portrayed as homosexual, is then told that if he tries harder to approach his wife and tell her she’s pretty, it will all work out. While it will certainly help most marriages if the husband will make nice comments about his wife’s appearance, it seems unlikely to help this one. Maybe it will, I don’t know, but it seems that a deeper look at the issues would be in order.
I realize that people may say, “Come ON, it’s just a movie!” as is often said to me, but I think when you command a national or global audience and you say something like this, you should have at least a rationalization for it. I speak to ten or twenty people and get called out, so if you characterize a man in a stereotypically gay persona and then say, “Tell girls they’re pretty and you’ll get over it,” someone should call you out. A movie like this which lacks nuance and character development should avoid this type of interpersonal issue.
I can think of lots of ways they could have nuanced the relationship, but this movie is not about subtleties. It’s about a lady who betrays one man, then another, then another, then falls into the ocean, all the while several swordsmen are hacking people up and giving love advice.
Save your money.